Tales from the Secret Footballer

by Anon, Anon

  Many years ago now, when I was just starting out in this game, I played for a non-league club. It is a club that I still go back to regularly. I’ve sponsored them, filled in as a part-time groundsman, brought teams to play there and played in charity matches (round of applause, please). I loved playing for that club: it was an amazing grounding and I had a manager who was a born winner. He helped to teach me the importance of winning, in fact, alongside a crazy foreign goalkeeper that I used to play with. He made the game feel like a war whose outcome would decide the fate of millions.

  That club was fantastic for me because I was still finding my feet, both as a semi-professional footballer and as a man. I was so green, so naive, but I did have a determination not to be the worst player on the pitch. Because of that I was often one of the best, and with the help of my manager and a few of the senior players I became a very good player at that level. I liked the non-league scene: some of the things you hear people shout from the sideline are hilarious. Once an opposition manager jumped out of the dugout looking as if he was about to launch into a full-scale tirade at his centre half, only to shout, “Tone! Tone! Are you wearing fucking boxer shorts again? What have I told ya? Don’t wear boxers – they make your knackers flap about,” before calmly sitting back down.

  The club is run by a committee whose members seem to have been there for a hundred years. And I never tire of giving them a bit of stick. I’ll say, “I don’t get it, John. When I was a kid down here, you were an old man; now I’m old and you’re still an old man,” and John will reply, “You’re still a clever sod, though, aren’t ya? No wonder your last club got rid of ya. Now give me your money for the golden goal – you haven’t been down for a while, so £20 should do it.”

  That’s what I love about these guys – they live and breathe the club. There was never any danger that any of them would blow smoke up my arse when I made it to the Premier League, and the lure of the tickets that I offered them was never able to trump a windswept, piss-soaked wooden stand in the back of beyond where they could watch their team play at a standard just below Conference level. But you should have seen them when I turned professional – I can’t emphasise enough how happy they were for me.

  My success also reassured them that they were doing the right things. I was the first player from that club to make it, and since I turned pro a steady stream of young and hungry players has been flowing out into the professional ranks.

  Sadly, though, time refuses to stand still and we have lost a few very dear friends in the last few seasons – people who had been at the club for 30, 40 or 50 years in one capacity or another. Last year, my best friend lost his father, a committee member who had held various roles at the club and done as much as anybody to push it forward. It was a blow for everybody, particularly as we’d lost another stalwart of the club only a few months before. As usual, it was standing room only at the crematorium and when I arrived the queue to get in was already extending into the car park. I joined the end and made small talk with ex-managers and players, then I heard a whistle from the front of the queue. It was my mate and he was waving me towards him. This was awkward: I assumed that he wanted me to sit up front with the family, and as I walked past everybody I felt very uncomfortable, as if they thought I was getting special treatment – at a funeral, no less. When I got to the front of the line I could see the hearse but still nothing clicked.

  “Listen,” said my friend. “Would you mind being one of the pallbearers?”

  I was honoured. “Of course not, mate.”

  “We’re a bit early,” he said, “so just have a chat with some people and come back over in about 40 minutes.”

  I had to call some friends to give them directions, so I went back to my car, as being seen on the phone at a funeral is very poor form. As I sank into the driver’s seat, the button on my trousers flew off and hit the windscreen.

  As is the usual process in moments as horrific as this, my initial bout of denial was followed by a swift cursing and denunciation of everything that God stands for. Eventually, I grudgingly accepted the reality of the situation and set about trying to come up with a plan. Unfortunately no plan could be found, and despite a brief – and fruitless – detour to a nearby pub on the offchance that they’d have a safety pin, I returned to the crematorium in a blind panic. The 40 minutes were up and my friend beckoned me to the front of the line to receive a crash course from the chief mourner in how to carry a coffin correctly. Unfortunately we didn’t cover the thorny issue of how to keep one’s trousers secure at the same time. By now I had broken out in a cold sweat.

  “Put one hand here,” said the chief mourner, “and the other arm across the shoulder of your mate next to you. We’ll start off on the left foot. Ready?”

  “Right.” I thought. “Wherever Ted is, he must be absolutely pissing himself right now, so we may as well both go out in style.”

  The mourners took their seats and the place was absolutely packed. I put my arm across the shoulder of another ex-player from the club and began to step in time down the runway, left foot first. Almost as soon as I did, my trousers slipped an inch, then another. I tried to walk bow-legged so they wouldn’t slip any lower than my hips, but I began to catch the foot of the man in front of me. The coffin was coming in sideways; I was waiting for the fire crews and accident investigators to appear along the sides of the aisle. It was going to be spectacular. I took another few steps and the trousers kept going, to the point where my Calvin Kleins put in an appearance. Another few paces and I caught the foot of the man in front of me again; this time the coffin shook violently and lurched to the right. My trousers retreated by another inch. By this time my jacket was riding up my back, giving the accident investigators a clear view of the problem.

  Finally we made it to the conveyor belt. I was at the back and could not wait to get the coffin down. By now my trousers were revealing more than they were concealing. There was no getting away from it – this was an awful day to be wearing fuchsia-coloured underwear.

  The guys at the front lowered their end of the coffin, then let go, leaving me struggling to do my bit with one hand holding up my trousers and the other still around the shoulder of the man next to me. The coffin went down with a hefty bump and the noise reverberated around the crematorium, drowning out the music for a moment. A few seconds later the terror was over and it was safely on the conveyor belt, much to everyone’s relief, particularly mine. I took a deep breath and tapped the top of the coffin before casually pulling my trousers up. I turned to see the mourners in tears and I was grateful that I’d managed to prevent a disaster on this sad day. But as I walked back down the aisle, I realised that they weren’t sad – they were crying with laughter. The lads at the back of the room were practically on the floor. I hope you’re happy, Ted.

  Back at the club where the wake was being held, I told my two friends what had happened: they had been sitting at the front with their mother and had missed most of the action. They cracked up, as I knew they would. As everyone who had been at the funeral told me, Ted would have been looking down and absolutely pissing himself. And that, in a nutshell, is how a footballer who escaped a small town and made it to the big time never had a prayer of forgetting his roots. I love these people.

  * * *

  My laptop was open but I hadn’t so much as glanced at it since switching it on. I hadn’t even noticed the table changing hands. When I’d walked into the coffee shop there had been a very promising brunette that I’d taken for a student sitting there. She’d been sipping a frothy latte when I last looked but at some point during the last 10 minutes she’d taken the decision to get on with her life. Her replacement was a tall, conservatively dressed, middle-aged man.

  I returned to doing nothing, gazing through the window towards the end of the street where a seemingly endless stream of students were emerging in a way that suggested they didn’t exist until the very moment that I laid eyes on them. The man next to me was people-watching too, but he in
troduced an extra dimension by commentating as people ran out in front of a car – “Woah, steady!” – or offering a merry “After you!” as strangers converged on a pavement and blocked each other’s paths. There was no getting away from it: all the signs pointed to a man spoiling for small talk.

  Closing my laptop, I made the mistake of taking a final look through the window. It proved fatal.

  “You look lost,” said the man.

  Had I been taking my medication as I was supposed to, I could have batted him away and been down the road before the waitress even had a chance to clear my table, but my quick wit had flicked into screensaver mode weeks earlier.

  Since that time Mr T, as we’ll call him, has become a great friend and instilled what has become a bit of an obsession with physics and, in particular, quantum mechanics. Most of my understanding of the subject is a couple of rungs below the Idiot’s Guide to Quantum Mechanics entry level, while he is a professor working on some incredible experiments at Cern. Still, we get on famously

  I love quantum mechanics: it’s so strange that, on the surface at least, much of it appears to be impossible. But this strand of physics continues to pass all the tests that are thrown at it. Despite the black holes that persist in certain areas of the research, it remains the one part of my life that continues to offer me some kind of meaning whenever I revisit it. It makes me feel insignificant, but in a way that helps me to dispense with all the bullshit going on around me.

  My interest was first piqued by a programme on Erwin Schrödinger, the great Austrian physicist and Nobel prize winner; his work is what helps me get through the mundane reality of life. The deeper I go, the less I understand and the more reassured I feel. That reassurance comes from something that Schrödinger described as “the wave function”. In short, two particles can become so deeply linked that a measurement of one particle immediately influences the other. For example, if we know that each of a pair of entangled particles is either red or blue, and we want to determine the colour of each one, we need to make a measurement of one of the particles.

  The mathematics that underpins quantum mechanics tells us that the instant we measure the particle and determine that it is blue, the other entangled particle will turn to red. This is called “collapsing the wave function”. And this happens no matter whereabouts in space the other entangled particle is. So even if the other entangled particle is 100 light years away, and despite the fact that we know that nothing can travel faster than light, the other entangled particle will still, instantly, turn to red. How is that possible? Nobody, not even Mr T, knows the answer.

  It is thanks to Mr T that Schrödinger’s Cat became entangled with this column about racism. Initially my idea was to have a black cat and a white cat as the lead-in, but it threw up so many problems that not even Mr T could resolve them.

  SHADES OF GREY

  First published 30 January 2013

  I love Schrödinger’s Cat. There are many versions of this famous paradox but here’s my favourite.

  We put a cat in a bunker with some unstable gunpowder that has a 50 per cent chance of exploding in the next minute and a 50 per cent chance of doing nothing. Until we look in the bunker, we don’t know if the cat is dead or alive, but when we do look, sure enough – it is dead or alive.

  If we repeat the experiment with enough cats and gunpowder, then half the time the cat will live and half the time it will die. But before we look, the cat is dead and alive; it is only the act of looking that forces nature’s decision. For the cat’s part, it will either see the gunpowder explode or not.

  So the gunpowder explodes and the cat sees it explode or the gunpowder doesn’t explode and the cat doesn’t see it explode. The cat’s reality becomes entangled with the outcome of the experiment and it is only our observation of the cat that forces nature to collapse into one reality.

  Thank God – or physics – that football isn’t as complicated. At least, it never used to be. The globalisation of our game means that domestic football in this country is now represented by players from all over the world who bring with them different faiths and cultural traits that entangle with our own.

  Occasionally, some of these different cultures smash together with all manner of pundits, journalists and fans eager to give their interpretation of the results.

  If I were to ask members of our youth team on a Monday morning whether anybody from the FA or the Premier League has ever spoken to them about racism, I would bet everything I hold dear to me that every single one of them would say no.

  So one of two things happens: either players try too hard not to say something that could be construed as racist – and do. Or nobody says anything. And that is particularly scary.

  The problem is that there is a lack of real education on the issue. Throwing T-shirts at players to wear before matches is not education.

  Don’t get me wrong. We all know what racism looks like in its crudest form, such as the disgraceful monkey gestures we’ve seen in the Premier League from some fans, or the throwing of bananas on to the pitch, as happened to the Brazilian left-back Roberto Carlos while playing in Russia.

  What is required is a little education to fill in the grey areas. Take Alan Hansen, a former Liverpool player who is now a pundit on Match of the Day, who in 2011 described black players as “coloured”. There but for the grace of God – or physics – go I. Because when I was growing up in the early 1980s, my father was at pains to point out that the correct term for a black person was “coloured”.

  I was told to call the man who lived on the end of our row “Indian”, even though I am convinced that nobody had a clue where he was from. We certainly never used the P-word, even though at the time it could be heard on some of the nation’s most popular TV shows.

  Of course, nobody is going to tap you on the shoulder 10 or 20 years later with an update and, as we know, so much of what a person learns in childhood will shape their adult life. But that doesn’t make it acceptable to plead generational or cultural ignorance.

  It took an FA-led commission, whose report ran to 115 pages, to determine whether or not the Liverpool striker Luis Suárez had racially abused the Manchester United defender Patrice Evra in 2011. The commission had to consider that in Suárez’s native Uruguay, the word “negro” is a widely used term with which black people greet one another. But, after all, Suárez is mixed race and playing his football in England.

  Suárez was eventually banned for eight games and fined £40,000 due to a lack of video evidence.

  Keep in mind that John Terry, the former England captain, was banned for four games, despite all the video evidence that was presented during his hearing on whether he had racially abused Anton Ferdinand, the QPR defender.

  Perhaps the most lenient punishment of all came in December 2012, when Uefa imposed what Kick it Out chairman Lord Ouseley described as a “paltry” £65,000 fine on the Serbian FA after England’s black players were racially abused during an Under-21s match in Kruševac.

  The Professional Footballers’ Association can occasionally be heard in the middle distance calling for tougher punishments. But its chief executive, Gordon Taylor, would do well to get in front of the players instead of the TV cameras he seems to prefer. In the absence of any leaders educating the next generation, we continue to see unsavoury episodes.

  We are moving very quickly towards a state of extreme paranoia, where everybody is a racist until it’s proven that they’re not. Take the farce at Stamford Bridge last year, when Chelsea complained that referee Mark Clattenburg had called midfielder John Obi Mikel a “monkey”.

  When I phoned my friend at Chelsea, who was in the dressing room as things were kicking off, he told me that even the rest of the Chelsea players didn’t believe Mikel and said as much to him.

  But Mikel’s claim was backed up by his Brazilian team-mate Ramires, who, as my friend put it, “hardly speaks any English”.

  It is common knowledge that Clattenburg calls almost every player on t
he pitch by his nickname and, as my friend said: “We know in all likelihood that the ref has called him ‘Mikey’ but what can we do?” Premier League rules state that clubs have to make their complaint after the game, when tensions are obviously running high and people are emotional.

  Again, as my friend said: “We didn’t want to complain but we had to.” Fair enough, but the fact the story made its way into the public domain almost before the players had left the stadium could have cost Clattenburg his career if the story hadn’t been so unbelievable. Fortunately, he was later absolved.

  You don’t need me to tell you that a football changing room is a unique place to work in. We bend more rules than the Catholic church and each player will be pushed as close to their tolerance threshold as possible in an attempt to find the boundaries of acceptable mockery.

  There are examples of this behaviour every single day. During the running sessions in which the fitness coach will tell you, “We’re looking for winners,” the person who crosses the line first will usually be abused based on a strong feature that they have – a person with a big nose might hear a fellow professional shout: “He won it by a nose!”

  There are also individual players who have their own unique relationship with each other. I know a black player and a white player who go out of their way to deliver insult after insult about each other’s race and personal appearance. They are strong characters, enjoy engaging each other on that level and treat their relationship, it seems to me, as a test of quick wit. It’s worth pointing out that they do it only in front of the squad.